Making a Visitor Check-in/Out form/sheet/dashboard. Anyone have any experience/tips to give on this?

Ty Werven

Visitors will come check in and ideally scan a QR code on a form which will just have some basic information. This would ideally go into a sheet with that info. I would like to also make a dashboard as a visualization to other visitors as well as staff that show how many people are currently visiting (only two visitors can be in at a time per person they are visiting). Another issue I am thinking about is that it is likely that not all people will check out. Any ideas about this whole process?

Brian_Richardson

Yes, capturing info on a form and then doing something with it, that's one of the key Smartsheet strengths.

I'd suggest open the Template Gallery and browse a couple of solutions for Intake that look reasonable.

In general your setup will be:

1. An Intake Sheet with the data you want to capture as columns
2. A form in that Intake sheet with the columns as fields to fill out, and any rules you want to apply (ie making things required, hiding certain fields, showing certain fields when someone picks an option in another field) and formatting
3. An automation in your Intake sheet to send an Update Request to someone for checkout. Assuming you want them to check a checkbox or enter a checkout time. You'll need to ensure you capture their email as part of your form questions. You'll need to decide how to trigger the automation - perhaps they get it immediately and hold onto the email until they are ready to check out, or you can set the automation to run on a recurring basis and send them a request until they check out. In the Update Request automation, you can specify just the basic info and the Checkout checkbox for them to fill out - they will get an email each time the automation run, with a button to press to open a simple form where they can check the checkout box or enter time or whatever you want them to do.
4. A report that uses the Intake Sheet as a source and has the columns that you want to use on your dashboard. Use the Grouping button to group the rows by something that makes sense for your dashboard, maybe Room or Patient or something similar. Use the Summary button to add a Count of the visitor's Name column, that will tell you how many people you have visiting per room at any time. Also use the Filter button to filter out anyone who has checked out.
5. A dashboard that uses your report in a couple of ways. Put a Report Widget on the dashboard to show the data (if you want to display the detailed information). This can also be a way to give people the list of current checkins and allow them to click on it and check themselves out without using email. Be sure to set "Open source data" on the Report Widget to allow this. Also put a Chart Widget on the dashboard, using the same report, to show the count per room graphically in real time. Dashboards auto-refresh every 10 minutes.

With that setup, you have a form that people can fill out. When they fill out and submit the form, Smartsheet will add their checkin as a row. The Update Request will trigger once or many times, depending on how you decide to set it up, to provide them a way to check out via email. The dashboard will show you all the current checkins both as a chart and as data. If you make the dash available to guests, they can also use it to click through to the current checkin report and check themselves out without using email.

Other things to think about are how you want to clear that sheet periodically. Easiest thing is add a filter for checked out and periodically delete those rows. Or you can automate it by making a copy of your Intake sheet for Archive purposes and add a daily Automation that does a Move Row to move those checkouts over to the archive sheet once a day. You can then manually clear that Archive sheet occasionally, or make copies of it for historical reporting needs.